Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Franzen

Calling a scrappy post-punk band “the background music of my life” is Franzen at his most revealing: the grand American novelist admitting his soundtrack wasn’t grand at all. The Mekons aren’t classic-rock canon or prestige jazz; they’re messy, political, stubbornly unglamorous. That’s the point. “Background music” downgrades the usual myth of art as a lightning bolt. It suggests taste as something absorbed over years, not curated for display.

The phrasing also carries a sly self-portrait. Franzen is famous for control: sentences engineered, themes freighted, public debates litigated. The Mekons, by contrast, built a career on frayed edges and collective noise. Saying they scored his life hints at a private appetite for disorder, or at least for art that refuses to resolve cleanly. It’s a small confession that the sensibility behind the books might have been trained as much by DIY abrasion as by literary inheritance.

There’s cultural context baked in, too. For a certain cohort, alternative music functioned less as rebellion than as ambience: a constant wash while you studied, moved cities, fell in and out of friendships, tried on identities. Franzen’s line captures how subculture ages. What once felt like a stance becomes a companion. The Mekons “kind of” were that music - the hedge is important, a typical Franzen half-step away from sentimentality. He wants the intimacy without the gush, the allegiance without the fanboy flag.